Links for December 29th through January 28th

Links for December 29th through January 28th:

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Website maintenance with Textmate and FTP/SSH Bundle

I tend to work on local copies of my websites, which have either corresponding vhost entries in my local Apache configuration, or are simply symlinked to my ~/Sites folder. That way, I can test to make sure everything’s 100% before I make changes live.

This has typically been a bit of a messy workflow – I make changes, and then when happy, either open up a terminal and rsync the whole lot over, or open up Flow/Transmit and manually copy the changed files over. The whole thing makes me disinclined to make changes at all!

That is, until on a whim, I did a google search for a Textmate FTP bundle, and found Bernhard Fürst’s FTP/SSH Bundle for Textmate. This little gem lets you configure FTP settings for a project, then hit Option-S to save to the remote server, or Option-R to reload from the remote server. This way, when I’m happy with the changes, I just whack Option-S to send them to the server straight from Textmate.

That makes me happy.

One little caveat – the bundle does an odd thing with the project directory, opting to use the parent folder of the Textmate project file, something which won’t work for ad hoc projects, when one just drags a folder into Textmate (one of my favourite features). A quick fix:

  1. Find Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/FTP-SSH and open its contents
  2. Open up Support/lib/helper_functions.php
  3. Change the $PROJECT_DIR definition on line 15 to:

    $PROJECT_DIR = $_ENV['TM_PROJECT_DIRECTORY'];

Voila!

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Unwired Usage Dashboard Widget

Introducing the Unwired Usage Dashboard widget for Mac OS X: View your Unwired usage statistics right on your Dashboard. No more logging in to check on your quota.

Displays both on-peak and off-peak quotas, and shows time remaining right alongside your quotas so you can compare your progress through the billing period.

Download it here:
Unwired Usage 1.0.1

Unwired screenshot

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Counting words in LaTeX documents with TextMate

When working on LaTeX documents in TextMate, the default word count feature isn’t too helpful, as it also includes all of the LaTeX control sequences in the count. There are plenty of suggestions out there, but this is one I came up with, which works the same way as the default word count facility (Ctrl-Shift-N):

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU
 
def pretty(number)
  number.to_s.gsub(/d{1,3}(?=d{3}+(?!d))/, ',')
end
 
counts = `detex -l | wc -lwc`.scan(/d+/)
counts[0] = counts[0].to_i + 1 # increase one to the line count
 
%w[ line word byte ].each do |unit|
  cnt    = counts.shift
  plural = cnt.to_i != 1 ? 's' : ''
  printf("%11.11s %s%sn", pretty(cnt), unit, plural)
end

This is just a copy of the default statistics action from the Text bundle, but with the ‘detex’ utility added into the pipeline to remove all LaTeX control sequences.

Put this in a new command in the LaTeX bundle, with ‘Selected Text’ for input, and ‘Show as Tool Tip’ for output. I assigned Ctrl-Shift-N as the key equivalent.

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Elegant Grunge PSD

Due to popular demand, I’m making available the Elegant Grunge PSD, so that users can make modifications more easily. It can be downloaded here (5.5 Mb):

Download Elegant Grunge.psd.zip

A note on contacting me: Please don’t make direct contact asking about customisation, as I don’t have the resources to help you. These kind of questions should be directed to the WordPress forums. Thanks!

If you like Elegant Grunge, please consider buying one of my products.

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Loopy status update

loopy-construction.png
Loopy has been generally successful in the 3 weeks it’s been on the market, and I’ve received many useful suggestions from users, as well as lots of positive feedback:

“What a fantastic app. It is entirely intuitive in use (although there is a very neat video tutorial) and is just the most wonderful fun.Be the first to write a bit of music using extant environmental sounds; loop them and then bung them wirelessly into your Mac (Or Windows) DAW for that final bit of tweaking.Or just sit there humming. Or plucking. I said plucking.This is a beautifully written application.Go. Have fun!”

“Great app! By far the most useful multitrack on tis appstore (yes I have tried them all) in spite of some UI niggles that I am sure will be ironed out (such as the miniature glowing LOTR icons/buttons), very excited for how this app will evolve…”

“By far the most useful multitrack recorder for the iphone.”

LOTR icons, you say? One loop to rule them all…

The most demanded features so far have been:

  • Lead-in recording
  • A better metronome/timing mechanism, more adjustable, and with the ability to adjust tempo mid-session
  • A limiter
  • Panning support
  • The ability to import loops

I’m in complete agreement that these would be useful features, and will be working to include them all in the next release of Loopy.

Other things currently on the to-do list include:

  • More tracks, with home-screen-esque swipe functionality to access other pages of tracks
  • Undo functionality
  • Gate functionality and perhaps mixing improvements to limit noise
  • A track editor, to tweak timing, and possibly ADSR envelope functionality

And of course,

  • Community functionality

I am currently engaged in putting together the next iPhone App, which should be completed over the next few weeks. Then, back to Loopy.

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Apple iTunes Connect Trend/Transaction Report Processor

Process Transaction ReportsI’ve written a droplet which takes a transaction report, as downloaded from iTunes Connect and containing a summary of sales, and produces a single figure representing the total earnings, in a particular currency.

Because the report shows sales for each separate region, a bit of work is required to get a total earnings figure, involving multiplying royalties by number of sales for each region, and then converting each currency type and adding all results together. This droplet does it all for you – just drop the downloaded text file from iTunes Connect onto it and it’ll bring up a summary. A preferences window allows configuration of the currency.

Currency conversion information provided by timegenie.com.

Download it here: Process Transaction Reports droplet

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